6 No-Nos for Great Abs + 5 Great Workouts

Everyone wants a smaller, tighter, fitter midsection. I get more questions about ab exercises than any other exercise. People want to improve their belly, but there is no ab exercise in the world that can make your stomach look great if you aren’t improving other things than contribute to the big belly issue.

Here are a few other issues that need to be addressed if you want to get a six-pack!

1. Poor posture. One reason we battle the bulge is because we are lazy. We don’t maintain good posture and hold our stomach in like we should. Laziness causes us to lose our resting tone in our abdominal muscles, allowing our gut to stretch out the abdominal wall. We can increase muscle tone simply by keeping our tummy tight and standing up tall.
2. Overeating. I’m not just saying that because overeating makes you fat. When we eat large meals our stomach increases in size, pushing out against our abdominal muscles. It’s a lot easier to maintain a smaller, tighter waistline by simply eating smaller portions.
3. Lack of knowledge. If you think it’s too late to get a six-pack, think again.  Look at all the women who retrain their ab muscles after pregnancy. The same can happen to a beer belly too. Crunches, sit-ups and plank exercises get great results and don’t require a gym membership or equipment. However, there’s a lot of other incredible exercises and equipment to help you get that 6-pack a little faster. Don’t rely on crunches alone. Try exploring new ab workouts regularly or hire a trainer to put you through a new ab workout to try new exercises and techniques.
4. Avoiding cardio. Cardio not only reduces body fat that covers your abs, but some cardio actually works your midsection more than others. Trade the bike for exercises that allow the arms to swing and the upper body to rotate, like running or the elliptical. Aerobics classes, like kickboxing, are also excellent because they incorporate a lot of rotation through the mid-section. Concentrate on the ab area while exercising, maintaining good posture and tight abs throughout the exercise.
5. Not tracking food. We can do abdominal exercises until we’re blue in the face, but it won’t do a thing about the fat that’s covering our muscles. The only way to trim off the fat is to take in fewer calories than we burn – and you can’t really do that guessing your way through your diet. Otherwise, we will just have a six-pack under the keg. I personally follow a set amount of calories and macros when I’m trimming down to guarantee my success. Lord knows, I don’t want to do all that work for nothing! So, I make sure I’m working as hard in the kitchen as I am in the gym.
6. Looking for shortcuts. So may people try everything in the book but the right way to get results. They try diet pill, supplements and the craziest exercise apparatuses promising crazy results in less time and with less effort. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Let’s face it; we can’t get a six-pack in six minutes without changing what we do in the other 1,434 minutes that fill our day.

So many people are doing a TON right, but they are still doing enough wrong to not get the full benefit. I challenge you to address each one of these possible issues and apply these tips for 30 days and see how much faster you can uncover your abs!

Here are 5 ab/core workouts to try!